High & Inside

[1]Above: The Baseball Project performing at Dogfish Head in Rehoboth Beach Wednesday night.

The moment that Baseball Project[2] singer/guitarist Scott McCaughey raised his middle finger to the standing-room only crowd at Dogfish Head Wednesday night, he joked about regretting it.

“That’s gonna be a great picture,” said McCaughey, who has been playing with R.E.M. for the past 17 years and also leads bands like The Minus Five and Young Fresh Fellows.

The flip-off wasn’t directed at a drunken fan or a loud talker — it fit in perfectly with the song the four-piece had just wrapped up, “The Yankee Flipper,” a tune about how New York Yankees pitcher Jack McDowell gave the middle finger to the home crowd while getting yanked from a game and booed in 1995.

“Everybody wants the chance to flip-off 50,000 Yankees fans, right?” McCaughey asked, stoking old baseball rivalries for great effect in between songs at the Rehoboth Beach brewpub.

The band’s 17-song, 75-minute set began with a spirited opening performance by Harrisburg, Pa.’s Parallax Project, although the baseball games on the bar’s televisions were the real opening act: the Yankees against the Boston Red Sox on one set and Cliff Lee and the Philadelphia Phillies blanking the Cincinnati Reds on the other.

The band’s song, “Chin Music,” about the art of the bean ball, was dedicated to Red Sox pitcher John Lackey, who had drilled Yankees catcher Francisco Cervelli the night before for celebrating his home run at home plate.

Wrapped around these baseball-centric songs about everyone from Curt Flood and Bill Buckner to Ichiro Suzuki and Ted Williams was a tight a sound with Steve Wynn (Dream Syndicate) on guitar, his wife Linda Pitmon on drums and bassist Sal Maida, who has also played with Roxy Music, sitting in for an injured Peter Buck of R.E.M. Most songs floated around the power pop world with some country, rock and punk swirled in.

Locally, Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Roy Halladay was worked into a song about perfect games called “Harvey Haddix,” named after the Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher who threw 12 perfect innings in 1959, but lost the game.

With a dancing crowd before them, The Baseball Project closed out the night with a pair of up-tempo covers: Minor Threat’s “Good Guys (Don’t Wear White)” and Roxy Music’s “Re-Make/Re-Model” — a bit of a peace offering perhaps for non-baseball fans in the crowd.

Even if you didn’t know the constant stream of players, teams and memorable baseball moments, the band put on a show with McCaughey jumping up and down at points and cracking jokes as good as his songs.

At one point, he noted that the next song was going to be less than two minutes long, about the amount of time it takes to brush one’s teeth.

After the slow (and somewhat long) Wynn-sung song “Fernando” about former Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Fernando Valenzuela, McCaughey dead-panned, “You could have brushed your teeth a couple of times during that one.”